The idea of cooperative communication originates from relay communication. That is, a user transmits information by cooperating with another relay node to ensure communication between the user and a destination node. Currently, a relay-based next-generation network architecture has become a research hotspot. With a cooperative transmission technology, the network architecture not only can support direct communication between a source node and a destination node, but also allows, by introducing one or more relay nodes, information sent by the source node to be processed in a particular manner by each relay node before the information is forwarded to the destination node. In this multi-hop transmission manner, obstacles such as a building that obstructs electric wave transmission are bypassed, so that impact caused by large-scale fading is overcome to some extent, a path loss between a transmit terminal and a receive terminal is reduced, and transmit power of a device is reduced, thereby suppressing system interference and increasing a signal-to-noise ratio of a signal. In addition, because the destination node may receive and process, according to different combination manners, signals that are from different transmission nodes. In addition, cooperative transmission can significantly reduce impact caused by small-scale fading on a channel, so that a signal transmission environment is improved to some extent, and different diversity gains are obtained.
Network coding is an information exchange technology that integrates routing and coding. The idea of network coding is to perform, on each node on a network, linear or non-linear processing on information received on each channel, and then forward processed information to a downstream node. If network coding is used, an intermediate node on a network does not perform storage and forwarding only, but instead, encodes received information and sends encoded information, so that a capacity and robustness of the network are improved. System performance can further be improved by organically combining network coding and cooperative communication.
However, in an existing technical solution in which network coding and cooperative communication are combined, there is still a problem of low transmission efficiency. Therefore, transmission efficiency or transmission flexibility further needs to be improved.